Pavegen Generates Electricity from Your Footsteps

Devices that can harvest energy from sun, wind, and other hybrid sources and then convert it to electricity are literally abundant. But very few are capable of taking the potential of your footsteps. You heard it right! Your footsteps, if dealt properly, can give you free electricity; neat! A London-based startup seems to understand well about it and it successfully invents energy harvesting tiles called Pavegen.

In case you’re curious, the name of the technology behind Pavegen’s development is hybrid piezoelectric and it was exhibited for the first time at the London Olympics. These special tiles were installed on the passage connecting West Ham tube station and Olympic Park. Thanks to this, the Olympics committee didn’t need to pay the bill for the electricity used to light up 12 LED spotlights along the passage.

Pavegen’s official page has been up at Kickstarter for a while now and we don’t think it’s doing well there. You can watch the video below!

Unlike the tiles installed on West Ham station, Pavegen sports a small LED light on its center which is switched on every time it’s stepped on. The developer expects that it’ll engage more people resulting in more footsteps from which it can generate more electricity. It’s creative, indeed, but will definitely make the fool of you.

Still, we suppose Pavegen has some very serious potential here. You can imagine how many feet are moving on the floor of a busy Manhattan’s subway every morning and how much electricity you can generate from them. We’re crossing our finger now, hoping that it’ll manage into production; we hope you do too.